Now might be the best time to buy a GPU, maybe for years.

No, seriously. People have been saying it is going to be better for years and it has not happened. I bought my RX 6800 two years ago, second hand and I could sell it for the same price. I am no expert on these topics, but I wanted to share my thoughts and was wondering what your thoughts are. I also cannot see into the future, but with the current developments, things might really just get worse. I am talking about the following points:

1. AI Boom
2. Taiwan vs. China
3. Trump as a president

Let's start with the AI Boom. There is three ways this can go.

1. AI continues growing: This is not entirely unlikely. Even though LLMs have proven to be of limited use, they are here to stay for a lot of applications. Even if users prefer to ignore advances of corporations into OSes, they are a very efficient way to harvest a lot more data compared to what was possible before. The growth in production capabilites will most likely not grow as fast as the rising demand, AI cards can be sold at a much higher price b2b than gaming cards, there is no good reason to sell gaming cards except for barely keeping the gaming market alive.
2. AI stagnates: For GPU prices, this is the best outcome of the three. Back in the 80s there already was a GPU boom and it died down. A slow flattening of the growth would likely yield capacity for gaming cards while also not crashing the market and bringing utter mayham.
3. AI crashes: I do not consider this to be completely unlikely. People realize LLMs are not humans. Already generated texts, images, etc poison newer AI models, the footprint of data mining has gotten so bad that some websites receive the majority of traffic from some form of bots and as a reaction deployed a proof of work captcha, reducing the number of sites that can used for information harvesting. AGI is nowhere to be seen even on the horizon - and there is no good reason to believe this will change anytime soon. A crash would probably cripple the industry, with a lot of unused production capacity that costs a lot of money. Corporations might even increase costs for other chips to keep themsevles over water and god knows what kind of repercussions this would have to the market considering there is almost nothing that does not relie on some sort of digital infrastructure. Even if prices for GPUs come down, we might not have the money to buy any.

Taiwan, China, Trump: This belongs together in my opinion. China seems to prepare an invasion to Taiwan, Trump continually destroys the American economy and becomes an urelieable partner to his allies all over the world. Domestic problems in the US make a intervention less likely. With almost all important chip production being domestic to Taiwan, a war would upset the availability of most high end products in the hardware space. If the factories at TSMC are destroyed the only other option offering a similar node size and capacity would be Samsung and maybe Intel with the latter struggling to compete for years. Rebuilding all these factories would mean years of shortages. The political developments in the US will also result in less foreign brains entering the country which is heavily dependant on these people. I would not be surprised if corporations relocate if the uncertainty in tariffs continues and political uproar increases. Even if companies do not relocate, the influx of bright minds will drop noticably with the percecution of foreigners. For the same reasons, EU states and the EU as a whole are trying to become more technically independent, f. e. by removing Windows from the offices, which will open opportunities for IT industry workers. This is probably also true for other first world countries as well, I just hear more from the EU. Granted, becoming independent in software is easier than achieving the same in silicon. This will hopefully not create too much disturbance, but in the context of the current lack in chip production cpacity, this will make the already tight situation even worse.

Alright, now I am interested in how you tear this apart.